An appropriate subtitle for this update on war and
propaganda is this: “How the despair and death of millions in Africa is daily
determined by the lifestyle of ordinary Americans, in small town USA, with nary
a word of truth in the US press, if anything at all, and why most of us know
nothing about it, and do nothing to stop it when we do know.”

Dissent
is intolerable to those who have something to hide, and so the discussion about
terrorism in Africa remains proscribed by academia, the media, and other
institutions of American empire. Africa is off the agenda. People are getting
away with murder, because they know they can, and the media doesn’t report it.
Indeed, they cover it up.

Since
1998 and the number of dead in Democratic Republic of Congo exceeds four
million. No one in the international community is talking about it. No one is
listening. Torture is commonplace. Refugees have been massacred. Innocent men,
women and children have been slaughtered. Civil society is under attack.
Children have been forcibly recruited as soldiers. Government is sowing terror.
Government is getting away with murder, mutilation and rape.

In
1990, the now President of Rwanda, Maj. Gen. Paul Kagame- returned from
training at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, to lead the first U.S. supported invasion of Rwanda by the
army of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). Kagame is identified with the Tutsi
tribe, but this is a meaningless social construction serving the western media
theme of “African conflicts by African people” (a.k.a. tribalism, yet again).

When
the plane carrying the Hutu president of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down over
the Rwandan capital on April 6, 1994, all hell broke loose. Under cover of “the
genocide” - and a total U.S. media propaganda blitz - Kagame and the RPF
invaded and secured Rwanda. Hundreds of thousands of killings attributed to
“the genocide” were committed by RPF forces in 1994. The killings spread to
DRC. With total U.S. military support, the RPF has committed countless crimes
against humanity.

Albright,
Clinton, Bush Sr., the national security apparatus - all had extensive
knowledge prior to April 1994 about the Hutu plan to exterminate their enemies.
The U.S. did not merely let “the genocide” happen, they assisted.

Zaire
was invaded in August 1996, immediately after Paul Kagame visited the Pentagon
to check his battle plans, and following George H.W. Bush’s telephone call to
his long-time partner-in-crime Mobutu Sese Seko, Bush was securing the mining
interests of his Barrick Gold Corporation, and those of his Swedish comrade
Adolph Lundin. Washington’s MPRI mercenary firm -- and a handful of Israeli
military experts -- advised the invading “rebel” forces. All hell broke loose,
again.

The
second U.S. supported invasion of DRC began in 1998. The International Rescue
Committee and the National Academy of Sciences independently determined that
some 3.5 million people died in DRC between August 1998 and June 2001. The
counting stopped there, but the killing didn’t.

The
U.S. is the leading arms dealer in central Africa. By 1995,

Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root was setting up
military bases in Rwanda. Back in the U.S. Jean Raymond Bouelle was setting up
America Mineral Fields Corporation in Hope, Arkansas, signing mining contracts
in DRC and Sierra Leone. U.S. Special Forces assisted the RPF and UPDF, and their
Congolese allies in the U.S. proxy wars for the Congo. The Bouelle companies
continue to pillage Africa under cover of war and executive privilege. The U.S.
provided military support and training for all sides under International
Military Education and Training, Joint Combined Exchange Training and the
Africa Crisis Response Initiative. These programs involve psychological
operations, tortures, massacres and disappearing as standard operating
procedure.

The
contre-genocide continues. April 2003, the eastern DRC city of Bunia was
devastated by RPF military operations. Tribal tensions have been inflamed by
RPF, UPDF and -- certainly -- by U.S. Special Forces. Massacres of hundreds of
people have lasted days at a time. Civilians have been herded into houses and
set on fire. George H.W. Bush’s Barrick Gold runs a concession at the nearby
Kilo-Moto goldfields.

Paul
Kagame was received at the White House on March 3, 2003. He later spoke at the
James Baker Institute, in Houston, where he met with his patron, George H.W.
Bush.

The
DRC people daily die due to the complete breakdown of everything – while
organized crime, sexual slavery and extortion proliferate. Eastern Congo has
been absolutely, and unfathomably, ravaged. Malnutrition affects some 16
million people in DRC where, on average, some 2600 people have died every day
of the war. It is protracted, horrible, unnecessary and stoppable.

Ditto
for Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola and Sudan.

The American way of life is
intimately connected with war-as-cover for Africa’s petroleum, copper,
manganese, uranium, gold, tin, bauxite, timber and water. Some 80% of world
supplies of cobalt and columbo-tantalite (coltan) are found in DRC. Cobalt is
the big story, never reported, stockpiled by the Defense Logistics Agency,
elemental to the superalloys of the nuclear weapons complex. Coltan is
essential for cell phones, playstations and computers. Africa’s diamonds are
sold on Main Street, USA. Every diamond is a “blood” diamond.

The
New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times all
manufacture the disinformation. Writers and academics like Philip Gourevitch,
Christopher Hitchens, Mahmood Mamdani and 2003 Pulitzer winner Samantha Power
– the bonified experts on “the genocide” in Rwanda – have covered
these stories up. Indeed, ostensible “exposes” surfaced June 6, 2003, in the New
York Times and other newspapers, and have run repeatedly on National Public
Radio – an emerging propaganda campaign designed to legitimate the
international mining cartels.

Even
the peace and justice community has dismissed the DRC, and Africa more broadly.
People don’t hesitate to take action to try to stop war in Iraq. We struggle
with the Palestinians. Our witnesses for peace frequent Latin America. Our
conferences and workshops proliferate and, more often than not, Africa is
entirely off the agenda. Worse still, the excuses abound. Meanwhile, the
refugees and political dissidents are all around us. Africa suffers in silence.
It is the legacy of our lifestyle and the intention of empire. It is
depopulation, by design.

~begin

keith
harmon snow is a
journalist and photographer whose dispatches on war in Africa and
disinformation in America won two Project Censored awards in. In 2000 keith
spent seven months in Africa researching genocide and U.S. covert operations,
and he attended the criminal International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda in
Arusha Tanzania. In 2001 he provided expert testimony at a special
congressional hearing on genocide and covert operations in Africa, in
Washington DC. He has worked in 16
African countries.